On January 23rd, residents of Minneapolis who have been protesting the presence of ICE agents in their city declared a general strike. I had spent much of the previous week there, and the strike had been talked about as the culmination of the city’s anger at the deployment of three thousand immigration agents into the region. That Friday, businesses suspended operations for the day, museums didn’t open, and people stayed home from work. Thousands gathered for anti-ICE demonstrations in subzero temperatures in downtown Minneapolis. About a hundred clergy members staged a sit-in at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport and were arrested.
Around nine the next morning, federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti, a thirty-seven-year-old Minneapolis resident who worked as an I.C.U. nurse at a V.A. hospital. It was the third shooting of a Minneapolis civilian by federal agents this month, and the second fatality. “Not again,” says a voice in the first video I saw of the event, recorded from across the street. As with Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis resident whom an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross had shot and killed during a confrontation between anti-ICE activists and federal agents on January 7th, and Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan immigrant who was struck in the leg a week later, the Department of Homeland Security quickly asserted that the victim had posed a threat, and that its agents had acted in self-defense. Pretti “approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun,” the D.H.S. said in an initial statement. The Minneapolis police chief said that Pretti was licensed to carry a gun; it appears to have been holstered and doesn’t seem visible in his hands at any point in the video footage circulating online. The D.H.S. has said that it will lead the investigation into Pretti’s death, despite the fact that its agents have, according to the Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, committed two of the three homicides that have taken place in the city so far this year.
For the rest of the day, Trump Administration officials continued to deflect accountability. Posting on X, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi blamed Pretti’s killing on Minneapolis being a sanctuary city; Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, in a press conference, criticized protesters for obstructing officers; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth urged “shame on the leadership of Minnesota—and the lunatics in the street.” Pretti’s family issued its own statement. “The sickening lies told about our son by the administration are reprehensible and disgusting,” it read. “Alex is clearly not holding a gun when attacked by Trump’s murdering and cowardly ICE agents.”
The city reëntered a state of paralysis and grief. The Guthrie Theatre and the concert venue First Avenue cancelled that evening’s shows, the Timberwolves game against the Golden State Warriors was postponed, the Saint Paul Winter Carnival called off its annual King Boreas’ Grande Day Parade, and the National Guard was activated. On the coldest weekend of the winter, protesters again took to the streets.
I had arrived in Minneapolis a little more than a week earlier, on January 14th. That evening, at around seven-thirty, news started breaking that federal immigration agents had, for the second time in a little over a week, shot someone in Minneapolis. Within minutes, and with few details available, people began converging on the scene, a residential block of north Minneapolis on the other side of the city from where Good had been killed. I arrived at the vicinity of the second shooting after nine o’clock that night. Temperatures were in the low teens.
“Go home!” someone standing in a group of fifty or so onlookers shouted at a few dozen ICE agents, in desert camo and gas masks, lined up in front of them. The two groups were separated by a strip of yellow police tape that neither side appeared to be interested in crossing. According to information that would later emerge, a federal agent had shot Sosa-Celis as he fled. Accounts would differ as to what had happened. In an F.B.I. affidavit, an ICE agent claimed that Sosa-Celis had attacked him with a broom; Sosa-Celis, who has been charged with assaulting a federal officer, denied the charges through his lawyer, and has said that he was holding a shovel but didn’t hit anyone with it, and that he had made it back inside his house before he was shot. By the time I arrived, Sosa-Celis had been taken away in an ambulance and hospitalized. (In a statement, the Department of Homeland Security said that Sosa-Celis entered the U.S. illegally in 2022, and had convictions for driving without a license and for giving a local law-enforcement officer a false name; he remains in detention.) Now the homes lining the street were mostly dark, their shades drawn. Tear gas hung in the air.
“We know y’all cold, y’all not from here, get your ass home,” a demonstrator yelled. “Leave!” shouted another. I was raised in Minneapolis, a city whose activism became front-page news after the murder of George Floyd by a police officer, in 2020. When you grow up in Minneapolis, and then you leave it, two truths become apparent: winters everywhere else seem fake, and no other city’s politics seem as doggedly progressive, not even New York’s or Los Angeles’s, the Democratic strongholds where I have spent a lot of my adult life. Political postures treated as unrealistic in other cities are seriously considered here, such as a 2021 ballot amendment to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a department of public safety. (The proposal failed, with fifty-six per cent of voters rejecting it.) Minneapolis leftists might be gently mocked on the national stage—consider the character Paigyn of the television show “Landman,” a nonbinary, vegan college student from the city who has a pet ferret—but their convictions run much deeper than stereotypes about wokeness. The politics statewide are more divided, with the state House and Senate both nearly evenly split along party lines, but Minnesota has continued to elect Democrats to office and to swing blue in Presidential elections even as states around it have turned increasingly red.
In recent years, Minnesota’s Midwestern political exceptionalism has given it increasing influence in the Democratic Party: its governor, Tim Walz, was the 2024 Vice-Presidential nominee; Ken Martin, the former chair of the state’s Democratic Party (known here as the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, or D.F.L.), now leads the Democratic National Committee. And these politics may have made Minnesota a focus of the Trump Administration, which has sought to flood the state with federal agents and assert its political will. “FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Donald Trump had posted on social media the day before the second shooting.
The pretext, as it has often been with the Trump Administration, is immigration enforcement. In recent years, federal investigators have uncovered widespread billing fraud in Minnesota’s extensive social-safety net, which purportedly cost the state an estimated nine billion dollars or more since 2018 and has led to roughly sixty criminal convictions, mostly of Somali Americans. Aimee Bock, whom prosecutors called the “mastermind” of the biggest fraud scheme, is a white U.S. citizen who grew up in Minnesota, but that has not stopped Trump from framing the misconduct as an immigration issue. Trump has repeatedly denigrated Minnesota’s Somali Americans, an overwhelming majority of whom are U.S. citizens by birth or naturalization, and said that they should “go back to where they came from”; the Somali American congresswoman Ilhan Omar, whose Minneapolis district has elected her to four terms in office, is another frequent target of his insults.
In December, the D.H.S. started inundating the city with immigration agents, as part of what it is calling Operation Metro Surge. At first, the influx seemed similar to ones in Los Angeles and Chicago last year. In Minneapolis, as in those cities, ICE agents encountered organized resistance from activists on the ground, some of whom had been preparing since the 2024 election for the mass-deportation efforts Trump had promised. The conflict met its violent apex with Good’s killing. One poll of registered voters from around the country found that eighty per cent of respondents had seen a video of it, focussing the nation’s attention once again on Minnesota.
With the help of engagement-driven algorithms on social media, countless videos then circulated of federal agents in Minneapolis attacking people at a local high school, pepper-spraying activists in the face, and snatching suspected immigrants from their cars or at work. Before the killing, Trump deployed another two thousand federal agents to conduct immigration raids in Minnesota. (For context, the Minneapolis Police Department has roughly six hundred officers.) He also tried to target funding for the state’s food-stamp benefits. (A judge temporarily blocked the move.) After the Department of Justice pushed to launch a criminal investigation into Good’s wife, Becca Good, six prosecutors resigned from the local U.S. Attorney’s office, including Joseph Thompson, who had led the successful prosecution of the social benefits fraud. (Becca Good’s attorney told NBC News that his client has not been told she is under federal investigation.) Renee Good’s killing prompted Minnesotans to start attending know-your-rights training sessions in droves. One organization, Unidos MN, has instructed more than twenty-six thousand volunteers to be neighborhood legal observers—recently, nearly every training has reached capacity. Meanwhile, the detentions continue; Kristi Noem claimed on January 19th that D.H.S. had arrested three thousand “criminal illegal aliens” in Minneapolis in the prior six weeks.
From a nearby intersection, where another group of demonstrators had congregated, came the sound of flash-bangs, followed by yet another cloud of tear gas. I retreated from the scene with Ben Pettee and Isaac Wilkowske, whom I had met on the walk over from my car; both wore ski goggles, medical masks, and voluminous winter clothing. Pettee works as a policy aide for a local city councilperson; Wilkowske is an audio-visual technician at the University of Minnesota. The friends had been hanging out in the Y.M.C.A. sauna; when news of the shooting started spreading, they got dressed and quickly headed to the North Side.
“It feels like, I don’t know, there’s a certain different tension in the air,” Pettee said. “Isaac, would you say that?”
“Yeah, ever since last week,” Wilkowske replied, referring to Good’s shooting. “All bets are off.”
A large truck with flashing lights inched past, with “Crime Scene Team” and the logo of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension printed on its side. Wilkowske explained the significance. “Basically, the F.B.I., like, snatched the body of Renee and took the crime scene away from Minnesota B.C.A.,” he explained. (The F.B.I. and the Department of Justice have declined to launch a criminal investigation into Good’s death.) “Minnesota B.C.A. is the first one to investigate cop shootings. Every time there’s an officer-involved shooting, B.C.A. comes through,” he said. He took the truck’s presence as a good sign that the local government was asserting its jurisdiction. But it was also confusing. “Is everything we’re seeing from all these law-enforcement agencies a collaboration or a standoff?” Pettee asked. “It’s really hard to know.”
We reached Pettee’s car, where he plugged in his phone and then sat on it for a few minutes to try to warm it up enough to power on. Then, looking for a spare mask to lend me, he rooted under several sleds piled in the back. A long line of American-brand S.U.V.s with tinted windows, the telltale vehicles of federal agents, streamed past.
The next morning I sat in the back seat of a midsize car, next to a pair of hockey skates and some cross-country ski poles, as a pair of friends drove together around South Minneapolis, monitoring the area for ICE. Thousands of Twin Cities residents have started observing ICE, from cars or on foot, since the surge began. Others volunteer to drive workers to their jobs, monitor school drop-offs and pickups, or deliver groceries to people too scared to leave their homes. “A lot of the precedent for that was George Floyd,” an activist named Matthew Rodreick, who lives a little more than a block away from where Good was killed and about a mile from the site of Floyd’s murder, told me. In 2020, a system of block associations with captains and group chats was set up. Back then, Rodreick said, “I was out wandering the streets until five in the morning with neighbors making sure that nobody’s house was lit on fire, and we chased people out,” he said, referring to outsiders whom he believed were there to cause property damage. “And now that is happening again, and there’s this sense of immediately going back to that.” Although citizens cannot legally obstruct ICE from making arrests, they are allowed to watch and record, a right that was upheld on January 16th by a federal judge, who temporarily blocked federal agents from “retaliating against persons who are engaged in peaceful and unobstructive protest activity”—by arresting them, for example, or using chemical irritants against them. On January 21st, an appeals court suspended the order. The same day, Greg Bovino, a commander-at-large of Border Patrol and the most prominent Trump official on the ground during the surge in Minnesota, was recorded personally lobbing a cannister of gas at a group of anti-ICE protesters.
That morning, it did not take very long for the driver and his friend, whom I’ll call John and Sam, to spot an S.U.V. with tinted windows that looked suspicious to them.
“Is that the one we were following before?” Sam asked.
“No, that was an Expedition. This is a Suburban,” John, who was driving, replied. He took out a pair of binoculars and looked at the license plate, which was out of state.
“Oh, yeah, this is the intimidator guy,” he said, without elaboration.
A license-plate check with other observers in their chat confirmed that the car was a known ICE vehicle. Maintaining about a block of distance between them, John and Sam began following the S.U.V. (The A.C.L.U. has said that following law enforcement vehicles at a safe distance is legal as long as active operations aren’t obstructed and traffic laws are obeyed.) The Suburban’s driver soon became cognizant that he was being followed, and a game of cat and mouse began. At one point, the S.U.V. made a U-turn and drove past us. The driver, who wore glasses and no mask, gave a little wave.
“That was the first unmasked one I’ve seen,” John said.
Later, after temporarily parting ways with the S.U.V., the observers met it at a right angle at an intersection. John reversed, backing up and then stopping along the side of the street to avoid the impression that he was seeking an active confrontation. The S.U.V. turned into the oncoming traffic lane so that it now directly blocked us. For a minute, nothing happened. Then the S.U.V. pulled up alongside us, and its passengers rolled down their windows. This time they wore face coverings. In the back seat, one of the men held his phone camera out. (ICE uses facial-recognition technology to identify people.) The driver of the S.U.V. made a pointing gesture at John, then drove on.
“It probably already was, but now your car is, like, completely made,” Sam said.
“I’ve had them film it so many times,” John said.
They decided not to continue following the S.U.V.
The volunteer observation system has the flaws common to any vigilante system. Observers can get overzealous, and have misidentified ordinary people as federal agents. But John and Sam clearly felt that, without their observation, nobody would be holding ICE accountable. Local law-enforcement agencies, for the most part, have not intervened in ICE actions.
“We have a paramilitary force in our city acting beyond the Constitution consistently,” Sam said. “Clearly, they are just racially profiling people straight up, right? Complete violations of the Fourth Amendment, everywhere.”
“I just worry, like, what does it get us? I agree with you, but how do you enforce the Constitution?” John said.
They sat for a minute.
“You drive around,” John said.
“You drive around the neighborhood with a friend and make the best decisions you can,” Sam agreed.
Some restaurants in Minneapolis now keep their doors locked. The owners of a small neighborhood restaurant in South Minneapolis, a married couple who asked to stay anonymous because they feared retribution from the government, told me that they have started driving their nonwhite employees to and from work to try to protect them. (They submitted the necessary I-9 forms to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for all of their employees on hiring, they said, although the wife added, “We’re not document experts.”) When I met the couple at their restaurant one morning before lunch service, they both started to cry. The husband, who is a person of color, described how he now carries his passport card with him at all times, as does their son; the wife, who is white, feels less threatened. They listed several restaurants in the area that have made the decision to close, either to protect their staff or because their workers were too afraid to come in.
“It feels like there’s a really broad swath of people that they are going after that has less to do with their, like, actual status and more to do with just vibes—you know, do you have an accent? What color is your skin? Are you going to culturally relevant grocery stores or restaurants or churches?” Athena Hollins, a state representative from a district in St. Paul, told me. “That’s reflected across the Twin Cities, because we’ve had so many people who have been detained who are U.S. citizens.”
A twenty-year-old Somali American named Mubashir Khalif Hussen, a plaintiff in an A.C.L.U. lawsuit, was detained while walking down the street on his lunch break, despite being a naturalized U.S. citizen and offering to provide proof of his documentation several times. Nasra Ahmed, a twenty-three-year-old U.S.-born citizen of Somali descent, was detained for two days and, she said in a later press conference, sustained a concussion and was called a racial slur during her arrest. Local media has reported the detention of U.S. citizens of Latino, Hmong, and Native American heritage, as well. Local officials have attested that even off-duty police officers have been subjected to what appear to be racially motivated demands for proof of citizenship by federal agents. (In September, the Supreme Court cleared the way for federal agents to use race or ethnicity as a reason for questioning someone’s immigration status.)
In response, some people of color in the Twin Cities have limited their movements, regardless of their immigration status. Richard Gray, an emergency-room physician at Hennepin Healthcare, which serves a significant immigrant population and was the state’s first Level 1 trauma center (it is where Renee Good was taken after being shot), told me that patients have been intimidated into staying home. “Our census has dropped, our clinics are having more missed appointments,” he said. “During the day, we’re almost dead because I think a lot of the people have decided, right or wrong, that it’s safer to move around in the evening when they can’t be seen to be of color in their cars.” On January 8th, two days after a news conference outside the hospital in which local activists demonstrated against the presence of ICE agents there, D.H.S. subpoenaed Hennepin Healthcare’s employment records. (Some businesses who speak out in the media about the presence of ICE in Minnesota have found themselves the target of I-9 audits.)
Sergio Amezcua, a Mexican American pastor at Dios Habla Hoy, a nondenominational Christian church in South Minneapolis, started a grocery-delivery program for families whose livelihoods have been affected since the ICE surge began, in early December. On the first day, some two thousand households signed up. Now more than twenty-seven thousand predominantly Latino families have requested food through a network of twenty-two churches and twelve schools. The program has all but taken over Amezcua’s church, where enormous sacks of onions and potatoes are piled on the front steps, boxes of oranges fill a back room, and donations of diapers and formula have their own designated entrance.
“Someone told me that this looks like a hurricane-relief program,” he said, when I met him in his office. He sat under a family portrait of his wife and four children. The volunteers at the church are mostly American citizens, but vehicles driven by suspected ICE agents have passed by, taking photos and recording footage. Amezcua was of the opinion that Trump was using the ICE surge for political retribution. “People in the middle, which is our community, are paying the price for it,” he said. “And you’re getting this from a conservative pastor.”
Donald Trump has characterized those opposed to the presence of ICE in Minneapolis as paid agitators and insurrectionists. The people acting as legal observers whom I spoke with rejected that characterization. “We are law-abiding citizens,” Adam Levy, a sixty-one-year-old St. Paul resident and touring musician who has been watching agents in his neighborhood since December, told me. “We’ve all got families, we’ve got kids, and we’re committed to protecting folks right now. It’s not about, like, wanting to bomb ICE or kill people.”
Federal agents attempting to stop U.S. citizens from monitoring them have broken observers’ car windows, doused them with pepper spray, and shoved protesters to the ground. They have detained, shackled, and interrogated people before releasing them without charges. They have, at times, led the observers following them to the observers’ own homes.
On January 11th, Patty O’Keefe and Brandon Sigüenza, two friends who live in Minneapolis, were driving in a South Side neighborhood when a group chat alerted them to a confrontation between ICE agents and observers. When they arrived on the scene, the agents were leaving. “We proceeded to follow them down a side street, Sixteenth Avenue, honking our horn and blowing our whistles,” O’Keefe said.
The agents stopped, got out, and ordered O’Keefe, who was driving, to stop following them. It was only a few days after Good was killed, and emotions were high. As the agents began returning to their car, Sigüenza recalled, “Patty yelled, ‘Get the fuck out,’ and I started yelling Renee Good’s name.” An agent wearing a Timberwolves hat stopped and turned back. “He grabbed his pepper spray, came back to the car, and sprayed it into the intake vent of the car, like passing it back and forth,” Sigüenza said. When O’Keefe and Sigüenza continued following the agents despite the pepper spray now filling the car, the agents again stopped, got out, and smashed the windows of their Prius. (O’Keefe told me that they were not asked to get out of the car before their windows were smashed; Sigüenza said that his door had not been locked.) This time, the agents removed them both from the car and handcuffed them.
O’Keefe and Sigüenza have spoken to many media outlets, in part, it seemed to me, to process for themselves what had happened. In separate vehicles, they were driven to the B. H. Whipple Federal Building, where D.H.S. has been bringing the people it detains. O’Keefe said that during the drive the agents mocked her appearance and photographed her. “They were, like, ‘Oh, man, she has no good sides at all,’ ” she told me. She said that the agent in the Timberwolves hat lectured her to stop obstructing ICE, and added, in her words: “ ‘That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead’—speaking about Renee Good.”
At the Whipple building, the friends were cuffed at the ankles and placed in cells designated for U.S. citizens, separated by gender. Sigüenza was given a phone call; O’Keefe was not. O’Keefe struck up a conversation with her cellmate, a former U.S. marine named Skye, who asked that her last name not be published. That morning, Skye had tailed multiple convoys of federal agents with a companion; it was her first day out observing. The first convoy she followed, who she says were U.S. Border Patrol agents, led her on a tour of her current and former Minneapolis homes, and also addressed her by name, presumably to show they knew her identity. Another convoy led her to a rural area where at least one agent unholstered his weapon. With what had happened to Good in mind, she left and went to a Speedway gas station to collect herself. After leaving the gas station, she noticed two cars, including a Ford Expedition, following her. (“We were actually going to head home because we’d had enough weapons pointed our way that day,” she said.) Instead, the agents in the Expedition blocked her, smashed the window of her car, and threatened to tase her and her companion. She was ordered out of the car and arrested. “There were about four agents on top of me, they were handcuffing me and twisting my arm,” she said. “One of them tried to put my ankle in an ankle lock and tried to break my ankle, and when I screamed he said, ‘Yeah, you fucking like that, don’t you?” Once at Whipple, she continued, the agents took turns tightening her handcuffs, and it later took multiple people to get them off. Other people working there mocked her appearance. “They were saying, ‘Is it a guy or is it a girl? I don’t know.”
The three activists recalled how disorganized the operation seemed to be. “It didn’t seem like there was a system in place,” Sigüenza said. From inside the citizen cells, they could hear crying and yelling from the area where non-U.S. citizens were being held. Sigüenza and O’Keefe were both interrogated by agents who identified themselves as investigators for Homeland Security and asked them for information about plans for violence.
“I was, like, ‘You guys are way too afraid of us,’ ” O’Keefe, who works for a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy, said. “Like, no, I don’t know of anyone doing that.”
“They think we’re, like, you know, in cells with commanding officers in military barracks,” Sigüenza, who is a special-education teacher, added. “Like, I’m just a teacher, man. I was confused, kind of, like, Bro, who do you think I am?”
Both friends were asked for names. “He wanted the names of protest organizers. He wanted the names of undocumented people,” Sigüenza said. The agent tried to bargain with him. “He said, you know, ‘If you have family that’s out of the country that needs help getting in, we can help with that.’ ” (Sigüenza’s father, a naturalized citizen, was born in Mexico; his mother is from Wisconsin.) Sigüenza said that the agent also offered money, although he didn’t specify how much. (Both O’Keefe and Sigüenza said that they did not share any names.) D.H.S. did not respond to a request for comment, but in other media outlets D.H.S. Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has said that O’Keefe and Sigüenza were given multiple warnings to stop impeding law enforcement before getting arrested on January 11th. McLaughlin has also refuted claims that D.H.S. offered any “agitators” money in exchange “for information leading to the arrest of illegal aliens.”
After more than eight hours in custody, both were released without charges. (Skye had been released earlier, also without charges.) When O’Keefe asked if there was any documentation of what had happened, she was told to file a Freedom of Information Act request. Sigüenza was released onto the sidewalk in front of the entrance to the Whipple building’s parking lot, on the other side of the street from the site of a days-long protest. Caught by happenstance in another skirmish, he was pepper-sprayed and hit with a projectile on his way out of detention. Skye also exited into the street, where a protester lent her a phone to call a ride and get back to her car. It was left where she had been detained, in the suburb of Mendota Heights, windows smashed, her phone and car keys still inside.
On January 15th, Trump began teasing the idea that he would evoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow the Administration to send military troops to Minnesota.
“We do believe that one of the reasons why he sent this paramilitary occupation into our state, why this level of terror is taking place when we are seeing the kind of chaos that is ensuing, is because he wants to invoke the Insurrection Act,” Ilhan Omar, speaking after a field hearing in St. Paul on January 16th, said. “And we are telling our constituents not to take the bait. We are telling our constituents to lawfully practice their First Amendment rights.”
For now, there’s little more that the people of Minneapolis can do. On the morning after Pretti’s death, I stopped by the memorial that had formed where the shooting had taken place. Mourners arrived with flowers, a couple of them sang, one sat on her knees sobbing. The intersection of Twenty-Sixth Street and Nicollet Avenue is normally a lively area with restaurants, coffee shops, a yoga studio. Cheapo Records, a Minneapolis landmark that still sells used CDs, occupies one corner. I’d eaten dinner within a couple of blocks of the intersection several times over the past ten days, and one night had happened upon a punk-rock show behind the Black Forest Inn, a German restaurant that’s been around since the sixties. Now it had become an intersection with signs and votive candles. Counting George Floyd, it is the third site within a small stretch of South Minneapolis that will become synonymous with a violent death at the hands of law enforcement.
Sigüenza, who is a history buff, told me that he had been thinking about the historical parallels throughout his detention. The Whipple building is situated at Fort Snelling, where more than sixteen hundred Dakota people were held captive by U.S. troops during the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. He said that at the school where he teaches, which is in a suburb with a significant Latino population, children have been staying home out of fear. He noticed that during interviews about his experience, the focus has often been on his treatment as a U.S. citizen, which struck him as misguided.
“In my personal opinion, I don’t care about your documentation status—you’re my neighbor,” he told me. “The people they rounded up, they know how to drive in the snow, they have good coats: they’re Minnesotans.” ♦
